This was the final morning sermon I preached before the first Covid19 lockdown began in March 2020. Because we were very busy with other things I failed to post it online then. So here it is now.

Of all the parables Jesus told, everybody agrees that this is without doubt the most difficult to understand. The central character is a thief and a liar. Yet in the end he gets away with his crimes completely free. God is a God of justice and righteousness. How can we understand a parable where the hero is actually praised for breaking at least two of the Ten Commandments, stealing and lying? Let’s unwrap this story by reading it in its original setting.

The Master is a rich man who owns lots and lots of land. We know he is very rich and has lots and lots of land from the amounts of rent he is expecting. The debtors are the farmers who rent that land from the landowner year by year. They farm the land and when the harvest comes they pay either a fixed amount or a proportion of the harvest to the landowner.

In the middle between the landowner and the tenants is the manager. He acts as the agent for the landowner. He does the day to day work of arranging the contracts and collecting the rents on behalf of the owner. For that he receives a salary from the landowner and also some gratuities from the tenants. But in this story the manager is the bad guy. In some way which is not really explained he has mismanaged the accounts. There is no hint that the owner or the tenants have ever done anything wrong. It is all on the dishonest manager. He gets caught out and he is going to be sacked.

Jesus told his disciples: ‘There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2 So he called him in and asked him, “What is this I hear about you?

The manager daren’t say anything. He has been caught but he has no idea how much his boss actually knows or does not know. So he stays silent.

Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.”

At that point the manager is sacked. He has to turn over the books which say how much each tenant owes to the landowner. He has lost his job, his income, and with it his standing in the community as the manager trusted by the very rich landowner.

3 ‘The manager said to himself, “What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg—

This is a desperate situation. Sacked for dishonesty, the man would have few options. He could dig, the most menial and physically most demanding of jobs only taken by the poorest. If he didn’t dig he would have to beg which would be even more demeaning. But then in this desperate situation, the dishonest manager comes up with a masterplan!

4 I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.”
5 ‘So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, “How much do you owe my master?”
6 ‘ “Three thousand litres of olive oil,” he replied.
‘The manager told him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifteen hundred.”
7 ‘Then he asked the second, “And how much do you owe?”
‘ “Thirty tons of wheat,” he replied.
‘He told him, “Take your bill and make it twenty-four.”

So the dishonest manager calls in the tenants one by one and offers them a quick deal. He knows that this will leave them in his debt. He reduces their bills. Two debtors are mentioned but the implication is that he does the same with all the Master’s tenants. If you do the sums on those bills, that amount of olive oil would represent the yield of nearly 150 trees and the quantity of wheat would come from 100 acres, which all goes to show how rich the rich man must have been! The discount each tenant is offered is worth around 500 denarii, or 500 times the daily wage for a labourer. By cutting their bills, the manager is making lots of friends who might offer him hospitality and maybe even give him a job. He was accused of “wasting the landowner’s possessions” which might imply that the rents he had arranged were too low to begin with. But on top of whatever he had done wrong with the accounts before, he is now lying and at the same time cheating his boss by reducing the rents. Which makes the punchline so unexpected.

8 ‘The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.

Despite everything he had done wrong, in the end the dishonest manager was not punished. He was praised! This makes no sense! Until we look more closely at why he was praised.

8 ‘The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.

The landowner didn’t praise the manager for being dishonest. But he did commend him for being shrewd. His cunning plan was truly worthy of Baldrick, the servant in the stories of Blackadder. It was indeed a plan “as cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University.” The manager was praised for being shrewd. The same word is more often translated wise, and is always considered to be a good thing. We saw that same word last week in Jesus’s parable of the wise or shrewd or prudent manager of the household in Luke 12:42 who did his job and faithfully took proper care of all the other servants. We heard a few weeks ago about the man who sensibly built his house upon the rock and not on the sand, who is described in Matthew 7:24 as the wise or shrewd man. In Matthew 25:2 Jesus told the parable of the wise and the foolish virgins, with the five who wisely and shrewdly prepared to be ready for the returning bridegroom.

As in all these parables, in the Old Testament as well wisdom or shrewdness or astuteness was often associated with self preservation – in particular, being clever and skillful in order to avoid impending judgment. The dishonest manager was shrewd, or wise, or astute, or as the Message translates it “streetwise” because he took steps to avoid the judgment which was falling on him for his dishonesty. And the landowner, the Master, praised him for that shrewdness.

So here is the first and more obvious reason why the Master praised the dishonest manager. He saw that inescapable judgment was coming, but he didn’t just sit around doing nothing. The manager took action to be prepare for the future. It was not so important that the action he took was dishonest. What was praiseworthy was that he actually did SOMETHING to be ready for the judgment to come. Very much of Jesus’s preaching was warning people to be ready for the day of judgment which was coming. So this parable is encouraging people to prepare for that day of crisis with the same shrewdness and prudence and astuteness and zeal as that manager. Far better to do something, to do almost anything, than to ignore the problem and just do nothing!

We may see difficulties with the hero being a villain. In fact Jesus’s contemporaries would not have seen a problem in such stories. Jesus told a story where the hero is a man who steals his neighbour’s treasure by buying his field and another about a judge described as “unjust” who ends up doing something good. We celebrate Robin Hood who steals from the rich to give to the poor without dwelling too much on the central truth that Robin is a thief. In the face of oncoming judgment, better to do something rather than do nothing.

But there is another less obvious way in which the manager was being shrewd or wise. Let me explain. It all hinges on one fact. At the moment when the manager was changing the bills of all the tenants, they did not know that he had been sacked! He had a narrow window of opportunity after had been fired but before the community heard about it. He has been fired but the community don’t yet know that. So he comes up with his cunning plan.

Remember that the manager’s job was to set up the contracts between landowner and tenants. He had arranged all the rents in the first place. When he comes to reduce the rents, the tenants think he is still acting on behalf of the owner. They don’t know the manager has been sacked – they think everything is above board. Most likely they are given the impression that the manager has negotiated these reductions in rent with the landowner on their behalf. “I talked the old man into it.” So the manager is their hero for arranging these discounts and at the same time, even though it was a lie, the Master is being celebrated as the most generous landowner anybody could have.

So the dishonest manager is lying by giving the impression that he is acting on behalf of the landowner, when he has already been sacked. And in changing the bills he is robbing his boss. But at the same time he is being very shrewd and astute and cunning and streetwise. Because now the landowner is backed into a corner. He could tell everybody that the manager was sacked, and put all the bills back to their original amount. But if he reinstates the bills he goes in one breath from being the country’s most generous and beloved benefactor to being hated as a miserly Scrooge. If he punishes the manager now, the landowner seems to be punishing him for being too generous. Or the landowner can take it on the chin. He is very rich so he can afford to lose a bit of rent in order to keep his new reputation for being amazingly generous. As a bonus the manager gets to keep his job, at least for the present, and he has made lots of friends for that day in the future when he might get the sack which is of course what he deserves.

The cunning masterplan all rests on how generous the landowner will be. In fact the boss has already been amazingly generous. At the point that he sacked the manager the boss could have had him thrown in jail until he paid back what had been stolen. But the landowner was kind enough not to do that and instead he just demanded to see the books. So the landowner was already being incredibly generous. Would he show himself to be even more generous and let the dishonest manager get away with his masterplan? Yes – the Master really was that generous. The dishonest manager gets to keep his job at the same time as the landowner’s reputation for being generous is enhanced in the whole community.

That is why the manager is praised. Not for being dishonest but for coming up with such a shrewd and cunning plan, wisdom and skill devoted to the worthy task of self-preservation in the face of impending doom. The manager had been caught. Be he didn’t sit around and do nothing. Instead he put all his hopes on the generosity of his Master. And he wasn’t disappointed.

The manager was NOT praised for being dishonest. But he was praised for his shrewdness and wisdom in knowing where his salvation would lie, in his master’s generosity. In that sense this parable ties in well with the parable of the Prodigal Son immediately before – the son who got himself in such a mess but had the common sense to throw himself on the mercy of his father.

Judgment day is coming. For most people the light they are looking for at the end of the tunnel really is the headlamp of the oncoming train. So what should we do? It would be foolish just to sit around like a rabbit in the proverbial headlights and wait for the inevitable, not doing anything. Even a dishonest manager could avoid his inevitable doom if he acted astutely. When judgment is imminent and inevitable, the shrewd and wise person takes action and trusts in the incredible generosity and mercy of God.